Griper Blade: Teaching Kids to be Christian on the Public Dime

This has come up before. The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools is a group that says it advocates using the Bible as a teaching tool in history and social studies. That wouldn't be an extremely controversial proposal -- most americans are christian, so studying the american people could include references to the Bible. Martin Luther King, jr., for example, referred to the book often. Wouldn't it be helpful to look at his references?

That's NCBCPS's argument, but the reality is that they want to use public tax dollars to teach kids to be christian. A lot of people aren't going to be too happy with that; something a Michigan School District is finding that out the hard way.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State:

A Michigan public school district is under pressure to provide a constitutionally suspect and factually flawed Bible course to its high school students.

The curriculum being pushed by a parent in Howell, Mich., is the product of a North Carolina-based group called the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools. The Council was founded in 1993 and has peddled its curriculum relentlessly nationwide. Its Web site argues that public schools are failing students by not focusing their attentions on the Bible. “The Bible,” the Council maintains (inaccurately), “was the foundation and blueprint for our Constitution, Declaration of Independence, our educational system, and our entire history until the last 20 or 30 years.”

The Howell Board of Education is set to meet this evening to discuss the issue. Board members should withstand political pressure and reject the Council’s Bible course, which is suited for some Sunday school sessions, but not the public schools. In fact, in the late 1990s, a federal judge barred a Ft. Myers, Fla., school from using the curriculum. U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Kovachevich in Gibson v. Lee County concluded that the course improperly sought to teach New Testament stories, such as the resurrection of Jesus, as secular history.

Howell Board of Education members seem, ironically, ignorant of history. The Florida case was a fiasco for the board members who'd pushed the curriculum. The two members backing it found themselves out of a job by the time it was all over. The whole thing became a mix of anti-semitism, zealotry, and so-called 'christian' intolerance...

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